


How to Survive Being Struck by Lightning

by adreadfulidea



Series: The Overview Effect [1]
Category: Mad Men
Genre: Author's Favorite, Depression, Mental Illness, PTSD, Suicidal Ideation, post 7X05
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-03
Updated: 2014-08-21
Packaged: 2018-02-07 05:47:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1887231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adreadfulidea/pseuds/adreadfulidea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Michael Ginsberg, in the aftermath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Some minor warnings: there will be discussion of the Holocaust and its aftereffects in this story, as well as abuse and neglect in an orphanage setting. None of it will be graphic and I suspect that if you can watch the show then you can read this, but I thought I would warn just in case. 
> 
> Thank you to everyone who encouraged me to write this story. Special thanks to orangesparks for providing the soundtrack for my writing.

 

 

Ginsberg woke up with a start. The room was striped with light and shadow and Floyd was sawing logs, a motionless heap under the blankets. Ginsberg didn’t understand how he could sleep like that - it was too hot for even a sheet. And nobody was going to open a window for obvious reasons.

He lay on his back and thought about asking whatever orderly was out there if he could have a glass of water. There was a big oak outside the window and the branches scraped loudly against it, but that wouldn’t keep him awake. Very little did these days.

A voice floated out of the darkness, thin and spooky. “I dreamt about it again.”

Ginsberg jumped. The hair on his arms stood up. “For fuck’s sake, Sandy. Warn someone before you do that.”

He was sitting in the corner of the room with his legs crossed. His pale hair was sticking up all over and even from the bed Ginsberg could tell that his eyes were swollen. “I’m sorry,” he said, and wiped his nose on his shirtsleeve.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Ginsberg said, and forced himself to sit up. He sounded exhausted even to his own ears. “But you’re gonna get in trouble if you get caught. We talked about this.”

Sandy nodded. “I remember, I remember. But it was hard to think.”

“Yeah,” said Ginsberg. “I got some idea of how that feels.” He stood up and gestured for Sandy to join him. “Come on. I’ll walk you back.”

The hallway was as dark as the inside of a coffin. He held Sandy’s elbow so he wouldn’t bump into anything. It was so quiet that the sound of their footsteps bounced of the walls.They looked like ghosts wearing pyjamas instead of burial shrouds, wandering the halls, searching for something they would never find - lost loves or lost children. Sandy was barely more than a child himself. He was the most frightened person Ginsberg had ever met.

“I hate him,” said Sandy, suddenly, savagely, as Ginsberg got him back into bed. “I hate him so much.”

“I know,” said Ginsberg, even though he had no idea what Sandy was talking about. “So do I.”

 

He took a bath in the morning. It had horrified him, in the beginning, the lack of privacy. The burning indignity of undressing in the presence of someone he didn’t even know. Why aren’t there shower stalls, he had asked. Can I just have a minute alone, he had begged.

It had stopped mattering at some point. He didn’t fight anymore. They cut his hair, they told him when to eat and when to take his pills, he had to strip off in front of his roommate and an orderly - it was all the same. He was too tired to care. He lost track of time so easily, days or even weeks. It had become curiously featureless, a long unmarked highway.

Floyd didn’t give a fuck. He had been in the army when he was young, he told Ginsberg, scrubbing his toes cheerfully. That was routine, routine, routine, too.

“Was it as mind-numbing as this?” Ginsberg asked, because that was how he felt; frozen right through, like he was sleepwalking through each hour. I just want to go back to bed, he thought, but he always wanted to go back to bed.

Floyd didn’t hear. He was talking with the orderly - it was Sean, Sean was okay - because he had been in the army too and now they were comparing infantries or something. Gossiping like a couple of old hens.

Ginsberg tipped his head back and let the lukewarm water rise around his ears, blocking out the sound.

 

Stan came to visit him on the weekend. They walked around the grounds and made small talk. Ginsberg didn’t ask about work. He especially didn’t ask about Peggy. Stan tried to find out if Ginsberg was feeling any better without letting on that was what he was doing.

“Here,” he said, once the conversation dried up due to Ginsberg’s monosyllabic answers. “I got you something.” He looked shifty and reached inside his jacket.

“That better not be a dirty magazine,” Ginsberg warned. “They’re gonna take it away.”

“Why would I - you know what, don’t tell me. Just take it.” He shoved a box at him.

It was a carton of cigarettes.

“Thanks?” said Ginsberg. “I don’t smoke.”

“I know that. They’re for trading - like in prison.” There was an odd beat of silence, and then Stan nudged him. “It’s a joke, man.”

“Oh,” said Ginsberg.

Stan looked concerned. He always did. Ginsberg tried to keep a game face on for him but it was so hard. He couldn’t even fool his old man anymore, and on some level he was used to telling Morris comforting lies. Sure, I got some friends at school. They’re too busy to come over, is all. So we can’t afford college - I’ll do something else with my life. I’m just bad at meeting girls. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not half bad here, Pop. They treat me real nice. I’m getting stronger every day.

“So did they make you go see the shrink again?” Stan asked.

“They got a new one,” said Ginsberg. “I haven’t met him yet.” What was his name? Takahashi? No, that wasn’t right. Dr. Cunningham had moved on to greener pastures, and good riddance. Ginsberg spent one session with him and it made his skin crawl. The good doctor had expressionless brown eyes behind little glasses and an intense scientific curiosity about the workings of the abnormal mind. Ginsberg hadn’t told him a thing and still walked out of the room feeling like a petri dish. “Why? You think I should?”

“Probably wouldn’t hurt.” Stan said with a shrug. “Isn’t that what the guy is there for?”

“I’m not interested,” said Ginsberg. “He can’t help me.” There was no fixing him. A wire came loose in his head and there was nothing he could do to stop it. Defective from the start, probably. It made him sick to think that it could happen again.

“How do you know that? It could be the first step to getting out of here.”

Ginsberg stared. He searched Stan’s face for some kind of understanding. There was none; he actually thought -

“I’m not gonna get out of here,” Ginsberg said. “I’m a lifer.”

“Ginzo, come _on_ -”

“Stan, look what I _did_.”

“You weren’t in your right mind.”

“That’s the whole point.” Ginsberg’s chest felt tight and a headache was starting behind his eyes. He closed them for a second to shut out the sunlight, the trees, the birds that were flitting from branch to branch and singing merrily away. He couldn’t enjoy any of it. “There’s something very wrong with me, and it isn’t going away.” He took a deep breath. “And I think - I think you ought not come up so much.”

“So that’s it,” said Stan flatly. “You’re going to give up and just spend the rest of your life locked away.”

“I’m grateful you’re on my side, okay? I am. But I can’t be out there.” Ginsberg pointed towards the road, or at least the direction he thought it was in. “I can’t risk it. If you didn’t know me - if I was a stranger to you - would you want me mingling with the general population?”

“Who gives a fuck? I do know you and you aren’t dangerous.You sound -”

“Crazy?”

“That isn’t what I meant,” Stan muttered. He looked like he’d been told there was no Santa Claus.

“I know,” Ginsberg said. He held up the cigarettes. “You should take these back with you. I’m not gonna use them.”

Stan tucked the carton under his arm. “I still think you should keep them for bribes,” he said, and walked Ginsberg back to the building.

“I can get up next weekend too, if you want,’ Stan said when they reached the door. “You need me to bring you anything?”

I wish you wouldn’t, Ginsberg thought. What was the plan, that Stan was just going to keep dragging his ass up here, on and on through the years, until they were old and gray? He had other things to do. Everyone did. Ginsberg wanted to be left alone. He wanted to finish fading away, to be done with having to put an effort in. To stop pretending to be real person.

“I hate to ask,” Ginsberg started.

“Hey, I offered. What do you want?”

“Could you look in my Pop once in awhile?” Ginsberg asked. “He’s all by himself out there. Sounds real lonely whenever I talk to him on the phone.” Morris couldn’t get up as much as he wanted to. He didn’t have a car, and the neighbours weren’t being very generous in offering to drive him. Nobody wanted to get within twenty feet of the nutcase, apparently. It made him so frustrated - Ginsberg thought he could hear tears in his voice during their last conversation. Just fucking awful.

“Of course. Anything else?”

Ginsberg hesitated at the door. There was one other thing. He didn’t want to talk about it, but he might not get another chance - who knew what kind of state he would be in next weekend, or two days after that, or at any point in the future. Best to get it over with while he still could.  
“Can you -” he started, and then stopped. He watched an ant crawl up his shoe because he couldn’t look Stan in the eye. It was a minute before he could force himself to keep going. “Please tell Peggy that I’m sorry. For everything.”

And with that he turned and went back inside.

 

Ginsberg met the new doctor the next morning. He was sitting by the window, dozing off - he had passed a rough night. One of the nurses kept shining her flashlight into his room every thirty minutes. She must have been new, and overzealous.

Someone dragged up a chair. He heard it scrape the floor but didn’t open his eyes. If that was Floyd wanting to play cards he could piss off.

“Michael, right?” The voice wasn’t familiar.

“So?” he said, annoyed, and then sat straight up when he saw it was the shrink. He felt like he had been caught napping in class.

“I’m Dr. Tanaka,” the doctor said, and shook Ginsberg’s hand as if they were meeting in the Time Life building and not a room with metal grating over all the windows. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

His hair was heavily speckled with gray but he was younger than Ginsberg would have expected. Maybe forty, if his guess was accurate. No suit either, just slacks and a pinstriped shirt. He wasn’t wearing a tie.

“What are your plans for the day?” he asked.

“I hear they’re gonna serve meatloaf for lunch,” said Ginsberg. “which is an exciting development. Personally, I’m looking forward to it. After that, a game of backgammon if I’m feeling _really_ wild.”

The doctor didn’t take the bait. “Does that mean you’re free to talk to me for a few minutes?”

“Is this mandatory?”

“No. But I think it could be helpful.”

He went because he didn’t have anything else to do except look at the backs of his eyelids. At least talking to the doctor would keep him awake.

The office had changed since Ginsberg had been in it last. Before there had been fake paintings of fancy naked ladies on the walls and one of those weird looking sofas, the kind that was made for lying down on but not sitting. There was still a couch but it was normal, upholstered in light blue with wooden armrests and a couple of pillows. Dr. Cunningham’s wingback was gone as well - a wicker chair with a fat, patterned cushion sat in its place.

Two prints hung above the desk. They looked to be by the same artist - a central figure done up in vivid, flat colors on a black background. There were words on the bottom - Italian, he thought, or French. The first was a lady in a white sheet sitting on a giant bunch of grapes; the second a green devil uncorking a bottle.

“What are those?” he asked. He felt like he knew them from somewhere.

“Leonetto Cappiello,” answered Dr.Tanaka. “He was a great ad artist - I’m told you’re very talented in that area yourself.”

“No, I was a writer. I can’t do more than doodle.”

“Yes, sorry - that’s what I meant.”

“Yeah, well,” Ginsberg said, uncomfortable. He would rather not talk about work at all if he could help it. “Am I supposed to lie down?”

“Or you can sit. Whichever you would prefer.”

He did sit, in the middle of the couch. “Are you writing a book, too?”

Dr. Tanaka looked puzzled as he took the wicker chair. “I’m not writing a book, no. Did you think I was?”

“That’s what everybody said about Dr. Cunningham. That he was writing a book and he left ‘cause he was finished.”

For a split second Dr.Tanaka looked like he had bitten into a lemon, but his face smoothed out quickly. “No, I won’t be doing that. Nothing we discuss will be in a book. I wanted to ask how things have been going for you here,” he said. “How do you feel you’ve been adjusting?”

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”

“You’ve had a very hard time of it lately and it’s a big change in circumstances. No one could blame you if you felt unsteady.”

Ginsberg shrugged. “I mostly feel tired.”

“Is that normal for you?”

“Normal? You must be talking about some other guy.”

Dr. Tanaka didn’t say anything; just looked at him, calmly and clearly - and Ginsberg dropped his gaze to his knees.

“I used to have lots of energy. And I had a lot of sleepless nights, too,” he admitted. “I don’t know how both those things are true, but they are.”

“They may be related. Was it a nervous energy? Or did it make you happy?”

“I - both?” He had always been an emotional person. His highs were high and his lows were low. But he knew damn well that it was unusual to wake up in the middle of the night with his heart pounding for no reason. That most people didn’t obsess over some horrible thing they had seen on the news for days at a time, or spend a significant portion of their lives certain that something bad was going to happen, but not knowing what, never knowing exactly _what_. He had always had a tendency to get too wrapped up in his own head. It was just that before he hadn’t known how bad it could get. “I’d say my nerves are bad. I mean, obviously.”

“How did you deal with it, typically?”

Ginsberg stared at him flatly. “By maiming myself and ending up in the nuthouse.”

“That wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t a poor decision - it was a symptom of illness.”

“That’s _worse_ ,” Ginsberg said, low and bitter. “I can’t trust my own mind. I thought I could see danger on the horizon, you know? That I had to warn people about it. But it was only me, all along. I had a wrong idea in my head and I burned down my life because of it.”

“You can still have a life,” said Dr. Tanaka said gently. “You have one right now. You’re being very hard on yourself.”

“What life? I’ll be stuck in here for the rest of it. I might as well -”

“Might as well what?”

“Forget about it,” Ginsberg muttered. He wasn’t going to tell some shrink about what he thought about when the lonely hours dragged on, about how he was never going to go see a movie again or bring home takeout for his father or walk past a bakery and smell fresh bread. “I just mean that I might as well have jumped off a bridge. I’d have as much chance of coming back from it.”

“And is suicide something you’ve considered?” Dr. Tanaka sounded concerned, which Ginsberg supposed made sense - it was his job. “Either in the past or now?”

Never before, but - well, he hadn’t had a reason to, before. It wasn’t like he had a plan. He didn’t sit around comparing methods of self annihilation. It was an option, that was all. If things got too bad, if he couldn’t take it any longer. It was just an _option_.

“I wouldn’t,” he told the doctor. “It would kill my father.”

 

They watched him real close after that. He wished he hadn’t said anything at all but there was no use trying to do something about it. All he could do was wait for it to be over. That was the theme of his life as of late.

He let Floyd teach him chess and he read the same books over and over until he could mouth the words without looking. They started up an art therapy program but it was of no use to him. He stared at that canvas until his eyes watered but nothing would come. One morning he talked Sandy into going outside and they made it all the way through the garden before Sandy panicked and had to go back in. That was a good day.

On the bad ones he woke up knowing he was in a cage; either he got jittery and they would make him take an extra dose of sedatives or he would spend the day curled up by the window in the activities room, completely checked out. He spoke when spoken to, but that was it.

It was that kind of day when a nurse materialized by his chair - he could never hear them coming, they must teach that in nursing school - and announced chirpily, “There’s a young lady here to see you!”

“No, there isn’t.” Rain had been threatening for hours and he was watching a summer storm build. The first raindrops were starting to streak against the glass.

“No, there is.” She faltered when he turned to look at her. “She asked for you by name.”

He had maybe a second of blissful ignorance, and then -

No. _Fuck_ no. Why would she even want to be in the same room as him?

“I can’t,” he said in desperation. “Tell her I’m sick in bed. Tell her whatever I got is contagious.”

The nurse drew her eyebrows together in a stern line. “I don’t think I’m allowed to lie.”

“Then tell her whatever you want - just make her go _away_.” I’m not ready for this, he thought. I’ll never be ready for this. He wiped his hands - suddenly clammy and shaking - on his pants.

The nurse came back in looking pissed off. Ginsberg knew what she was going to say before she opened her mouth. “She says she isn’t leaving. Should I have her removed from the premises?”

“No.” Of course Peggy wasn’t going to go gently into that good night. She never knew when to quit. “But gimme a minute first.”

She probably wanted - he had no idea. What the hell could she want? An apology? He would give that to her a thousand times over if it would do any good.

Briefly he wondered if he was going to have to go throw up. The room went all off kilter when he stood up and he had to put a hand on the wall to steady himself, swallowing hard against the rising tide of nausea. He took one deep breath and then another, slow and rhythmic, until he had it under control.

She was waiting at the nurses station, sitting on a folding chair. Her hair was slightly wavy with the damp and she had her purse on her lap.

“Hi,” she said with horrible false cheer. Her eyes flicked up to his close-cropped hair. When he was nine years old he had let his neighbor who was in beauty school give him a haircut for practice. She had paid him a candy bar and the effect was much the same.

“Yeah,” he said, running a hand over his scalp. It felt bristley and weird. “Can’t have the inmates looking unkempt, I guess.”

One side of her mouth dragged up in an attempt at a smile and fell away again. “How have you been?” she said. She sounded so nervous. He stayed as far away from her as possible.

“Fine,” he said. “I - yeah, fine. I’m keeping busy.”

She nodded. “That’s nice to hear.”

“How’s work?” he asked, and immediately winced at his own stupidity. Why did he always say the wrong thing.

“It’s okay. Speaking of - that’s part of the reason I came up.” She fumbled at the clasp of her purse. Either it was stuck or her fingers weren’t working.

“Mathis cannot have screwed up my accounts that badly.”

She smiled at that, a real smile, though small. “No. But he’s limited.” The purse popped open and she reached inside. “I wanted to bring you this.”

It was a polaroid. He was very careful not to touch her when she handed it to him.

Some kind of - oh. He knew what that was, though he didn’t know why she would bring him a picture of a Clio.

“Congrats,” she said. “You won.”

“This - you’re saying this is mine?” He squinted at it and could almost make out his name etched on the front.

She crossed her legs and plopped her purse onto the floor. “Obviously I couldn’t bring the actual award. But I thought you might like to see it.”

Wasn’t that something. He would have given a hell of a lot to have one of these, once.

“I was good, wasn’t I?” he said.

Her expression softened. She had been holding herself together in a stiff, unnatural way - false bravado that didn’t come easily to her. Now it was gone, and she was sympathetic and worried and so very much Peggy that he had to look away. He didn’t want her to be worried about him. “Michael,” she said. “You still _are_ good. It’s not over yet.”

He shook his head. “Everyone keeps saying so. But I’m not getting out and I know it.”

“How? How do you know that?”

“Because people like me don’t get out of places like this.” He said it as gently as he could because he didn’t want her to think he was blaming her. Nothing about this was her fault.

“What about people like me?” Peggy’s jaw was set but her eyes were bright and wet - fear and determination in equal measure. She could be opaque as stone or clear as glass, and this was the latter; he was seeing something private and he didn’t understand why she was letting him. “Do I count?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, because it was impossible, what he was thinking. Impossible.

It took her a few minutes to answer him. She was gearing up, and he didn’t press her. The rain beat steady as a pulse on the roof. If he closed his eyes and concentrated he could almost smell it.

“I was in a place like this. I -” She shivered out a long sigh and went quiet, then started again. “I had a baby, and I gave him up. And I didn’t deal with it very well afterwards. So I - went away. I was there for months. I didn’t think I was going home either - or that there would be any point if I did. But eventually,” she shrugged, looking down at her hands, clasped together in her lap, “eventually you have to start living again. There isn’t any other choice.”

“Jesus,” he said. “That’s rough.” He had known that happened to girls sometimes - sent away by their families to live with an ‘aunt’ until they were conveniently slim again, because god forbid the neighborhood be made uncomfortable by biological fact. After that - the rumors and the gossip and the bullshit. He bet that most of those girls didn’t stay home for very long.

“It was. It just wasn’t the end of the world. When I got out - in the early days - I felt like I was all alone. My family was so disappointed in me. I’d look into people’s faces in the street and I hated them a little, I was jealous - because they didn’t know what it felt like to almost drown. They weren’t missing anything, not like I was. But there are more of us out there than I thought.” She smiled ruefully. “No one has ‘former mental patient’ cross-stitched on their forehead.”

Most days he still felt like he was bleeding out, slow but steady. “Does it get easier?” he asked, because he didn’t know what he was going to do if it didn’t.

“It gets - different. You get different. We’re all in pieces, Michael. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. But we can all learn how to live with it, too.”

He tried to imagine having a life again. Where he didn’t feel like somebody poisoned, like he’d handed down his own death sentence. “Peggy,” he said, “are you happy?”

“Sometimes I am. Sometimes I’m not. I’m told that’s how it is for everybody, funnily enough.”

“What if I’m too sick?” he asked. “What if I can’t get better?”

“I don’t think that’s true. Either way - you’re never going to know if you don’t try. Can you promise me you will?”

He nodded - he felt like crying, it was so stupid - she was telling him something nice, and he wanted to cry. But she didn’t hate him. He thought for sure she did. That she would have to - what he had done was so disgusting.

“You know what,” he said, and there was a definite quiver in his voice, “you are the most unexpected person I ever met.”

“Thanks,” she said, and she didn’t sound too steady herself. “I’ve never talked about this before. Not to anyone who didn’t already know about it. I never even told Abe.”

“Well,” said Ginsberg. “That’s because he was _Abe_.”

Her burst of laughter was goddamned beautiful. “He wasn’t that bad,” she said, wiping at her eyes with the edge of her hand.

The nurse came back over, drawn by the noise. “They’re serving dinner now. I’m afraid your friend is going to have to leave.” She was very cold about it. Ginsberg wondered what exactly Peggy had said to her.

“I’d invite you to stay,” he said, “but we weren’t expecting company.”

“That’s fine,” Peggy said, retrieving her purse from the floor. “Joyce is waiting for me in the car, anyway. She would have come in, but I wanted to talk to you alone.” The nurse was still looking over their shoulders - Peggy shot her a pointed look until she reluctantly walked off, heels clicking on the floor.

“Hope you brought an umbrella,” Ginsberg said.

“No. But we’re not parked far away.”

She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. He wanted very badly to hug her, but they weren’t there yet and maybe they never would be. So instead he smiled, and he hoped that did it - that it let her know how much it meant, her coming through the rain to see him. They both knew she didn’t have to.

That was important. Even if he never saw her again.

“Remember that you made me a promise,” she said. “I’m going to be checking up on you, so you’d better keep it.”

He went back to the window after she left and saw her heading for the car. She was running through the rain with her arms over her head to ward off the downpour, but when she reached the door she stopped and glanced up. If he could he would have thrown open the window and yelled, “get in the car, you lunatic!”. It was pissing down and she was getting soaked. She saw him watching, caught him in the act, and waved a hand wildly in the air. Goodbye or hello, he couldn’t tell - and she was shouting something, of course he couldn’t hear her, not at all - but he didn’t need to, because she was laughing too.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

“I’d like to ask you a few questions about your background. Or is there something else you’d like to talk about today?”

Here it goes, thought Ginsberg. He finds out I don’t have a mother and next thing he’ll be saying that being raised outside the nuclear family made me crazy. Did all shrinks do that, always blame the parents?

A couple sessions with Dr.Tanaka and he still didn’t know what to think of the guy. He seemed amiable enough, and didn’t ask rude questions or jump to conclusions. He let Ginsberg sit up like a normal person and even bring a cup of coffee into his office.Talking to him wasn’t unpleasant. Not like Dr. Cunningham, who had decided Ginsberg’s breakdown was caused by his repressed homosexuality, which in turn was caused by having no consistent maternal influence as a child. All this extrapolated from the fact that he’d never had a girlfriend. He didn’t know much about science but he was still pretty sure that wasn’t how it worked.

Besides which he had spent several blissful weeks necking with Hannah Abramson in the back of her parent’s store, right after they had graduated from high school. He didn’t tell Dr. Cunningham that. She was a sweet girl who didn’t deserve to have her memory besmirched by the doctor’s grubby mind.

“My father didn’t do nothing,” Ginsberg said. “He didn’t cause this.”

“I’m not looking to assign blame,” said Dr. Tanaka. “I want to learn more about you so I can understand you better. That’s all.”

Ginsberg sighed. “If you think it’s important - shoot.”

“You mentioned that you were adopted the last time we spoke. Do you remember the process, or were you very young?”

“I wasn’t a baby, if that’s what you meant. I was five so I remember it fine.”

“What do you remember about it?”

“Well, the orphanage was first. It was - I dunno. Cold. Long winters there - in Sweden, I mean. This was before we came to America. The building was drafty and we kids would huddle together in bed to keep warm on bad nights. But the summers were okay. We used to play outside in the mud as soon as the thaw hit and the matron would yell at us for ruining our clothes. And god forbid you get caught stealing food. The staff could be pretty handsy, if you know what I mean.” He had some vague memory of getting smacked across the head with a wooden spoon. Nothing about whether it hurt or not - though it must have - just that it scared the shit out of him. The first time Morris caught him with his hand in the cookie jar - boy, did he think he was going to get it. But instead his father just laughed and told him not to spoil his dinner.

“You mean that they hit you?”

“I don’t think they liked children very much. And I didn’t get it the worst - not by a long shot. Anyway, the food was probably crap and barely worth stealing.” Not like he’d have known any better at the time. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, and neither could orphans.

“Were you often hungry?”

Ginsberg swallowed a mouthful of coffee and shrugged. “It was an orphanage. Everyone was hungry. I’m one of the lucky ones - I got adopted.”

“Do you recall your first meeting with your father?”

“Kinda.” Ginsberg squinted, trying to break through the fuzz of long ago memories. “I think he gave me a package of candy, which made me like him. The adoption happened quick. I was in the orphanage one day, and getting sick on the boat the next, and then in New York. I don’t recall a lot of the finer points.”

“So you were born in Sweden, then, and -”

“Uh,” Ginsberg interrupted. “In the interest of being honest, no. In Germany. They said - look, this is what I was told. It sounds nuts. But they told Pop that I was born in a concentration camp. Which isn’t likely, right? How could that happen.” He had gone over the possibilities inherent in that scenario more times than he could count. Each was more awful than the last. “I bet it was made up. Probably they said it about all the kids.”

He knew that wasn’t true. Because he understood all about trying to sell the client on a story, and being born into that kind of horror was nobody’s fucking bonus.

Dr. Tanaka was looking at him very intently. It was uncomfortable, so he kept talking to cover his nerves. “It might be why he picked me. People like us gotta stick together.”

“What you’re saying,” said Dr. Tanaka slowly, “is that both yourself and your father are Holocaust survivors.”

He was giving Ginsberg that look - the one that was a mix of pity and shock. This was why he didn’t tell people. He _hated_ that look. It meant someone was coming to a conclusion about him, with or without his input.

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t tell people much.”

He’d told Peggy, though, and even he couldn’t explain why. Had to keep his back turned the whole time, but he had still done it. It felt right. His instincts hadn’t been wrong - she had been good about it.

“It’s a very unusual background to have.”

“Tell me about it,” he muttered. “It’s not as if I remember it - if I was there at all.” Which didn’t stop him from having a variety of Nazi themed nightmares, especially in childhood. He had never mentioned them to his father. It didn’t seem fair.

“Do you - was this discussed in your family?”

“It’s not some secret,” Ginsberg said. “But what were we supposed to do - compare notes? He doesn’t want to talk about it, especially with me. I get - I get upset, you know? He’s my father, and he was locked up and tortured in this terrible place. He could have died. Everyone he knew _did_ die. We have no other family.” He swallowed and rubbed a hand across his face. It came away damp with sweat and acid was climbing up his throat. “But he used to. I’m not supposed to know.”

“How did you find out?” Dr. Tanaka had the look on his face again, but maybe Ginsberg was being too hard on him. Maybe it wasn’t pity.

“Pop has these two suitcases. In the back of his closet - another thing I’m not supposed to know.” Ginsberg shrugged his shoulders. “But it’s a small apartment and kids get bored. So I snooped. There’s one for him and there’s one for me and they got clothes and toothpaste and a little money in them. He updated the clothes every year when I was young. In case we had to leave all of a sudden. And he has this picture in his. Of his family - his wife and a little girl.”

It was amazing that it had survived, all those years and distance, but it had. “1935” was written on the back and there were white creases all over from it being folded. Morris was young and skinny and his face was untroubled. The woman next to him had a beautiful smile and shiny smooth dark hair. Their baby girl sat on her lap, wearing a frou-frou dress that made her look like a cupcake. She was too small to really tell which parent she favored - but she had Pop’s eyes.

He must have looked at that picture a thousand times, always so careful to put everything back exactly the way he found it. His big sister. Except if she had lived, he never would have met Morris at all.

“I don’t know how he did it,” Ginsberg said. “I’d crawl into a hole somewhere and die. And when I think about how I _came_ from that shit…”

“Michael,” Dr. Tanaka interrupted. “I want you to listen to me. You did not come from that, okay? You didn’t come from a concentration camp - you came from people who were unfortunate enough to be in one. There is a big, big difference.”

“I guess,” said Ginsberg.

“I think we should stop here for today,” said Dr. Tanaka. “Because frankly you look like you could use a break.”

It was a relief to hear it; his head was starting to hurt and he had the shakiness that always came to him after a rush of adrenaline. “We still got twenty minutes,” said Ginsberg, looking at the clock on the wall. “What should we talk about?”

“Whatever you’d like.”

He didn’t have a subject handy - he was too occupied with historical nightmares for that. But he had never been good at sitting in silence either. “You watch baseball?” he asked aimlessly, drinking cold coffee.

“No,” said Dr. Tanaka, and laughed. Ginsberg knew he liked him for a reason.

 

Ginsberg gnawed at his thumbnail for the millionth time that day before forcing himself to stop. He might have to sit on his hands to keep them away from his mouth. It was a habit he had dropped when he was a teenager, but now it was back in full force. He looked like rats had been chewing on his fingers. But there was something soothing about it.

Across from him Dr.Tanaka sat quietly, waiting for an answer.

“Is this really a good idea?” Ginsberg asked.

“It’s your decision,” said Dr. Tanaka.

“I know. You said that before.” Ginsberg drummed his fingers on armrest of the couch. He wanted to say no. Except he also wanted to say yes. Because he needed to believe that this was a possibility.

Dr. Tanaka had spent their previous session quizzing Ginsberg thoroughly about what he called his ‘stress responses’. They had gone over his family’s history - again - as well as anything he could remember from the orphanage, the kinds of nightmares he had, what brought them on, everything. Did Morris have nightmares as well? Yes. Did he ever share the contents of them with his son? No, never.

They talked about his insomnia, how often it happened, if there was some trigger for it that he could identify - same as the nightmares, he said. And how bad did it get? Pretty bad, but never worse than it had been just before he hurt himself. He didn’t know how many hours, exactly, he had been awake - because it was like trying to sort out a fever dream - but he knew it had been a _long_ time.

Dr. Tanaka was very interested in how stress made Ginsberg feel physically. Did his heart race? Did he have trouble breathing? Yes, all of it, but the worst was when he felt out of his head.

“Out of your head?”

“Yeah,” Ginsberg told him. “It’s almost like floating - metaphorically - but, y’know, awful. Like I’m underwater and everything is very far away. It’s not that I can’t tell what’s real, but nothing _feels_ real. Not me and not anything else. It’s kinda like I’m trapped in a dream. It makes me dizzy and I end up panicking even harder.”

The night he did that _thing_ to himself he had been so detached from his own body. Like it belonged to someone else. He could remember thinking that he was drifting away, or maybe even dead already. And he had to do something about it. So he had stopped at a drugstore, bought razor blades and bandages, checked into one of those shitty by-the-hour hotels, and then - and _then_ -

“I hate it,” he said, sick with the memory.

Dr. Tanaka nodded, thoughtfully, like that meant something to him. Connecting the dots in his head.

And today he comes out with it that he thought the diagnosis was incorrect, and - what the hell was Ginsberg supposed to do with that? Dr. Tanaka was smart, but he could still be wrong -

\- what if he _was_ wrong?

“I could go crazy again,” said Ginsberg. “Without the pills. Crazier, even.”

“One of the benefits of being in a controlled environment is that we can watch for that. And get you back on medication as quickly as possible, if need be.”

“But I might hurt somebody this time.” And there it was. He was surprised that he could say it out loud at all. It was the heart of all his fears. He would rather - he would rather _anything_ happened but that. He’d rather be dead.

“You didn’t before.”

“But I might _this_ time.”

“And I say again: you didn’t before.”

Ginsberg frowned and picked at the ragged edge of a fingernail. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

“I think that it does,” said Dr. Tanaka. “Michael, the only person you hurt was yourself. That says something about you, okay? About what kind of person you are. But you don’t have to do this if you aren’t comfortable with the idea. You can say no.”

He wasn’t comfortable with the idea at all. But comfort wasn’t the point.

“I can try it,” he said. “If we’re careful. Really, really careful.”

“We will be,” said Dr.Tanaka, sounding a hell of a lot more confident about the whole thing than Ginsberg was.

So they discontinued the meds. The sedatives he could take if needed, but not every day like he had been.

And he kept expecting something terrible to happen. Waited for it, like madness would arrive right on schedule.

But the crazy thing, the really crazy thing, was that -

Nothing happened. Yeah, he was a little nervy without the sedatives, but he was learning ways to deal with that. They were still there if he wanted them, and knowing that helped. There was no hint of the paranoia from before. No machines invading his head.

Irrationally, that scared the shit out of him. There was no reason for it. He should have been fine. The nightmares started again - sickening, gory things that woke him in the middle of the night, gasping and drenched with fear sweat. He admitted defeat when he came to on the floor with Floyd and a nurse hovering over him anxiously. Apparently he had fallen right out of bed. The nurse gave him something to help him sleep.

“I fucked up already,” he said to Dr. Tanaka.

“You didn’t fuck up,” said Dr. Tanaka, and Ginsberg felt like he’d just heard his third grade teacher say a swearword. “You had a problem and you addressed it. That’s what the medication is intended for.”

“I thought it’d happen faster, getting better. Not one step forward and two steps back.”

“Think of it as a journey, not a destination.” Dr. Tanaka held up a hand when Ginsberg tried to speak. “I’m aware that’s hokey. It’s also true.”

“I am not a patient man, doctor.”

“I can tell,” said Dr. Tanaka dryly. “But keep in mind that Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

“But am I still gonna be like this if I get out?”

“You know I can’t tell you that. For what it’s worth, I think you’re handling this very well.”

“How? I can’t even go to sleep without taking a handful of pills first. Everyone else -”

“It doesn’t matter what everyone else can do. Stop comparing yourself to them.”

“I’m not,” he muttered, and sat back when Dr. Tanaka gave him a pointed look. “Okay, I am.”

“This is a minor issue, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Yeah, but -” Ginsberg shook his head. “Nevermind.”

“Michael, what’s _really_ on your mind?” Dr. Tanaka said, and Ginsberg hated being so easy to read.

“I’ve been thinking about what’ll happen when I get out,” he said, after a couple of false starts. “ _If_ I get out. I got no job - hell, my resume’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. I’ll never work in the industry again. They’re telling stories about me as far as Timbuktu, I can guarantee you. And it’s all through the neighborhood, too. So what do I do? I worked so hard, and it’s all gone.”

“Which isn’t fair.”

“I don’t want to sound ungrateful. I know it could have gone much worse for me. And when is anything _ever_ fair? But you have to understand,” Ginsberg spread his hands, palms up, “this is the only thing I have ever been good at. I got nothing else. So - what’s next?”

“It’s perfectly natural to mourn what you’ve lost. And I wouldn’t lie to you and say that it’s going to be easy. But I would caution you against limiting yourself. You can find another way to use your talents.”

“To make money, though? I don’t want to live with my father forever.”

“Most artists have day jobs,” said Dr. Tanaka. “And most of them don’t have to live with their parents forever, either.”

“You don’t think I need someone to - watch me?” Not that it had made a difference before. He’d gone out of his way to avoid Morris. Extra hours at work, walking through the city for half the night - he had only gone home when he knew that his father would be asleep. Once Morris had still been awake, waiting up in the kitchen, pale with worry. They got into a huge fight. Ginsberg told him to go fuck himself, that he would leave again if Morris couldn’t mind his own business, and he had never spoken like that to his father before, not ever.

He tried to apologize for it later from a hospital bed, doped to the gills, skin stinging beneath fresh bandages. One arm was strapped to the railing. Only one, but he was in no condition to fight. “You were just trying to look out for me,” he had said, or intended to; his voice slurred and rendered him unintelligible. Morris had shushed him and kissed him on the forehead like when he was a little boy. It made him cry like a baby.

“Are you concerned about being unsupervised?” Dr. Tanaka asked.

“It might be the only thing holding me together.”

“The point of analysis is so that you can ease some of these issues that caused your breakdown in the first place. If it works you won’t need someone always looking over your shoulder. Though,” Dr. Tanaka admitted, “I would advise retaining the services of a psychotherapist once you’re out. It can’t hurt to keep it up.”

“But what if my issues didn’t cause it? Maybe my brain is just fucked. We don’t even know for sure why this happened.”

Dr. Tanaka looked at him for a long minute, silently. “Michael, do you want to start taking the antipsychotic again?”

“No,” said Ginsberg. “I guess I don’t need it. Or I don’t need it right _now_.” He was biting his nails again - he balled his hand into a fist when he realised he was doing it. As many tells as a bad poker player. Fuck it, he was putting chili powder on his fingertips, like they did to break kids of sucking their thumb. “I’m borrowing trouble. And I got enough problems without looking for more. But -” he sighed. “My father’s coming to see me this weekend. Did you know?”

“I did. I’m glad to hear it.”

“All I want is for it to go well. For - nothing bad to happen. We haven’t been apart much - I don’t think he’s used to it yet. He deserves a nice visit.”

“So do you.”

Ginsberg shrugged. “He needs to know I’m okay. I don’t want to have to lie.”

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” Ginsberg said. He was - different. Different than he had been before losing his mind, sure. But maybe different than before he had walked into Dr. Tanaka’s office that first time, wrapped up in anger and fear. Tectonic plates were shifting under the surface and he didn’t know what shape he would be when they were done . “What does that word mean, exactly?”

“Now _that_ is a psychoanalyst's question. Should we be switching chairs?”

Ginsberg smiled. “You think? I do need a new job.”

The day of the visit he brushed his teeth twice and combed his hair until his scalp was sore. The last time Morris had come up he had been a mess. In his pyjamas all day, eyes puffy from sleeping too much, hair a mass of greasy tangles because he wouldn’t let anyone touch it. No wonder they cut it all off.

He paced by the window until Floyd made him sit down.

“Kid, you’re making me nauseous. Knock it off.”

“You don’t get nervous when your wife visits?”

“Trust me - she’s seen worse. We’ve been married for twenty years.” He tossed a magazine from the bookshelf into Ginsberg’s lap. “Read that. It’ll settle your mind.”

Not likely. There was all sorts of shit about the war it. Napalm, bodies blown to bits, villages obliterated in the night -

Floyd pulled it straight out of his hands. “Forget it - not that one. I’ll find you something else.”

When Morris got there Ginsberg was reading a recipe for pot roast. The side dish was some kind of sweet carrot.

He put the magazine down, trying not to be too eager or too distant or - weird, in any significant way. The nurse from the front desk walked Morris over.

He had lost weight. Enough to be noticeable at a glance. The lines in his face - put there by sorrow more than joy - looked to have deepened. When he gave Ginsberg a smile it was as fragile as tissue paper.

Jesus, thought Ginsberg. What am I _doing_ to him?

“Morning,” Ginsberg said, filling his voice with as much cheer as he could. “How was the drive?”

“Mrs. Babinski drove me up. Lead foot on her like a racecar driver.”

That was terrifying. Mrs. Babinski was eighty if she was a day. She wasn’t with Morris - probably she had wandered away to try and bum cigarettes off an orderly. Her children were always trying to get her to quit and she would give up for a week, two at the most, before throwing in the towel.

Morris hugged him once the nurse left, resting his cheek on the top of Ginsberg’s head, and he seemed inexplicably small all of a sudden. It wasn’t a physical change, weight loss or no, but like he had been reduced - like something precious had gone out of him.

It scared the hell out of Ginsberg. Not so long ago he had been a kid who thought that his father was the biggest man in the world. “Hey,” he said, “you okay?”

“Don’t worry about me,” his father said. “I only want to know how _you’re_ doing.”

“Let’s go outside,” Ginsberg said, “I’ll tell you all about it.”

 

They sat on a bench under the lilac trees. The flowers were all gone, which was too bad, but the shade was nice. There were beds of red geraniums and purple-streaked petunias to either side. Ginsberg had helped pluck out the weeds the other day.

“You look so much better,” his father said.

“I feel better,” he said. “The sky is clearer.”

That wasn’t really the right metaphor. It was more like he had been climbing up a mineshaft, and now he was getting to a point where he could see light at the end.

“Good, good,” Morris said, his eyes searching Ginsberg’s face. “You’re not mad?”

“About what?”

“At me.”

“Why would I be mad at you?”

“Because I put you in this place.” Morris said. “With these strangers. I couldn’t tell if they were taking the right kind of care of you. All the way in the city - I might as well be on Jupiter. Michael, I thought you _hated_ me. And when I saw you last -”

“I wasn’t at my best. I know it.”

“I thought I was going to get a phone call in the middle of the night,” Morris said, and at that the numb horror in his face cracked open and he was turning away, hands over his face, shoulders shaking.

“ _Pop_ ,” Ginsberg said, reaching out for him. He hugged his father tight against him, trying to still his trembling. “That’s never going to happen. I’m right here.”

Morris nodded against his shoulder. He didn’t stop crying, and his son didn’t try to make him. He just held on.

“I’m here,” Ginsberg repeated. “I’m _here_.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I conceptualize Ginsberg's illness not as schizophrenia - which is apparently the official explanation - but as an extended PTSD episode culminating in psychosis. According to my research up to 52% of people with PTSD have reported experiencing some kind of psychotic symptom, so the two disorders can certainly be comorbid. It's also not uncommon for the children of Holocaust survivors to develop PTSD, for those wondering. And that's without taking Ginsberg's particularly upsetting history into account.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some period typical homophobia in this last chapter. Nothing you haven't seen in the show.

 

 

Ginsberg was supposed to be keeping a diary for his treatment. Everyone was - Dr. Tanaka thought it would be helpful for them to get their thoughts down on paper. He wasn’t going to read them; it was a psychological exercise for the patients themselves. And a record, for those amongst them who needed one.

He couldn’t get the hang of it. It was too clinical. Talking to someone was different; that was a real person with a face and a voice. That was a conversation. The blank page stymied him. And here he thought he was pretty good with words, at least when they were the written kind. He couldn’t decide what to put down and what to keep to himself, because that was the problem right there. Someone - anyone - could pick a book up and read it. Not the best place for private thoughts.

Particularly when living with a bunch of bored mental patients.

So he started writing a story instead. It was a kid’s thing, a kind of fairytale without the fairies. It was about two children - a brother and sister - who crash landed on an alien planet. A spin on the classic two kids lost in the woods formula, Hansel and Gretel for the future. He hadn’t named them yet. Maybe they were twins, or maybe not. Maybe they were human, or maybe not. They had to make their way through an inhospitable environment towards - well, something. He didn’t know what yet.

It was dumb but fun. The kids tried to eat a piece of fruit and the tree it was growing on screamed at them to get away from her babies. They went swimming with people-sized jellyfish, all lit up inside by neon lights. Got chased by some animal that was made up of teeth and spit and bad attitude. All the while trying to find a way home.

The margins of the pages were covered in doodles of alien creatures and plants. Part of his creative process, he’d say if he felt like being pretentious. He had always thought in a very visual way.

It had been years since he had written fiction and he could feel how rusty he was. Like trying to use a muscle he had forgotten he had. At some point he had stopped thinking about writing as something he could do for himself, for his own reasons - it was always shaped towards what the client wanted. Now he didn’t have to worry about selling anything.

He was meandering some. It wasn’t the tightest narrative ever created. But it didn’t need to be, and he could clean it up later if he had to. They didn’t even have names yet, so. Room for improvement.

“Hey Sandy,” he said, pen hovering over the page. “If you had kids, what would you call them?”

Sandy looked up from the puzzle he was putting together. It was a country road flanked by maples, red and yellow and orange. Of course there was a white picket fence. He had only done the corners so far. “What?”

“Kids. Children. What would you name them - a boy and a girl.”

“Rose and Thomas,” Sandy said immediately.

Ginsberg didn’t know where Rose came from but Thomas was the name of Sandy’s older brother, the one who died in Vietnam. He never mentioned any other family, and never got any visitors.

He reminded Sandy - somehow - of Thomas. It wasn’t likely that the resemblance was a physical one, unless Sandy and his brother didn’t look anything alike. Ginsberg guessed it was more subtle than that, some quirk of personality or gesture that triggered recognition in the kid. They had come in about the same time. Sandy hadn’t said anything for days. Ginsberg was the first person he spoke to, asking him if he wanted to play checkers.

All he had wanted was to be left alone, and Sandy’s transparent fragility had scared the hell out of him. He thought he was unsafe. He didn’t understand why the staff let Sandy be around him - couldn’t they see how _dangerous_ that was?

But it had helped him, having someone to look after a little. Kept him getting out of bed in the morning.

“Is that for your story?” Sandy asked.

“How’d you know about that?” Ginsberg said, shutting the book and holding it close to his chest protectively. “You been reading my diary?”

“ _No_ ,” Sandy said, looking scandalized. “But everyone knows about it. I thought you told somebody.”

He hadn’t needed to, evidently. Maybe he thought about showing it Stan after he had finished and given it a solid rewrite. Get a second opinion, see if it turned out okay.

“It’s like living in a henhouse,” Ginsberg muttered. “Was it Floyd? I bet it was.”

“I don’t know,” said Sandy. He was frowning, the corners of his mouth creased with worry. “Are you mad? I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“It’s fine,” Ginsberg reassured him. “You didn’t do anything. I shouldn’t have left it lying around.” Everyone was always looking over someone else’s shoulder in this place. It was enough to make a guy paranoid, he thought, and then had to laugh right out loud. “That wasn’t about you,” he said when Sandy started at the sound. “I’m not making fun - I thought of something funny.”

“What?”

“It’s impossible to explain,” he said, and held up the journal. It was a cheap notebook of the sort used in elementary schools. “They should have gotten us the kind with a lock on the front, like little girls have.”

“Probably,” Sandy said. He tapped a puzzle piece against the table. “But we’d all lose our keys. Are you going to use the names?”

“Yeah, I’m going to use the names. If you don’t mind.”

Sandy brightened immediately. “I don’t mind,” he said, and looked about ten years old.

Ginsberg did ask Floyd if he was the culprit, over cards in the common room. He didn’t care that much but he was losing badly and hoped it might throw Floyd off his game.

“I don’t care what kind of mash notes you’re writing in there,” Floyd said. “Your secrets are safe from me. But I could’ve told you that was going to happen. There’s no such thing as private in an institution.”

“You’ve been in here before?”

“Not here, specifically. But yep, I was committed when I was about your age. This time I checked myself in. The wisdom of age, you could say.”

“What for?” said Ginsberg. “You seem so normal.”

“That’s because I was already coming down when I met you.”

“From what?”

“I’m a manic depressive. My highs are - _high_. I don’t make good decisions when I’m like that. So this time, when I started getting bad again, I cut it off at the pass.” He leaned forward, cards still fanned out in his hand. “And let me tell you - these places have gotten a hell of a lot better. The last one was a shithole.”

“Oh,” said Ginsberg. It had never occurred to him that someone might turn themselves in. But then, he hadn’t asked. He had made so many assumptions, going in. He had been terrified. “You hear some horror stories.”

“Many of them a hundred percent true,” said Floyd. “But things aren’t like they used to be, thank Christ. Anyone who tells you about the good old days is either an idiot or a liar.” He shrugged and rearranged his cards into some pattern more pleasing to him. “It depends on who’s running the show, like with everything else.”

Floyd had a family. He had a wife who brought him his favorite sandwiches when she visited and a daughter living in Fresno. Did he get married before or after he broke down that first time, Ginsberg wondered. It had to be before. No woman would marry a man who had been a mental patient. Not unless she was crazy herself.

He knew that he would never be with someone, now. That wasn’t for him. It had confused him enough before, when his biggest problem had been -

\- had been that he didn’t think ‘she’ when he tried to put together a theoretical romantic future in his head. He thought ‘them’, because that person-shaped space was awful likely to change on a whim - a shapeshifter that could look like a woman, or like a man; he could never guess which. Could be the pretty waitress who poured his coffee in the morning and was better at the crossword than he was, but could be the new hire in Accounts who stopped by his desk to tell him jokes. Sometimes, god help him, it was Peggy or Stan that he imagined.

He tried not to. But they were his friends. Wasn’t it natural that he would want them to be part of his life?

Not like that, he admitted. Never like that. Especially Stan - he would be pretty fucking unimpressed if he ever found out that Ginsberg thought of him - well, _physically_.

Maybe he _was_ a queer.

Who still liked girls. Nothing made any sense.

“Are we still playing, or did you just go off somewhere?”

“Sorry. I got distracted.” Ginsberg said, squinting at his cards and trying to remember what he had been doing with them. “Thinking of something else.”

“What?”

“What’s it like,” Ginsberg asked. “Being married?”

Floyd laughed, and at first he looked like he was going to make a joke. But he caught sight of the expression on Ginsberg’s face and reconsidered. “You know,” he said, sitting back and crossing his arms. “I don’t really know how to describe it. Kinda like being war buddies. But more fun, if you’re doing it right.”

“A lot of people don’t make it look like much fun,” Ginsberg said. God, the way some of the guys he had worked with talked about their wives. Like it was such a hardship to spend time with them, to have a woman around asking for a little bit of attention or affection. And all the while trying to get up some secretary’s skirt. Any secretary - it didn’t matter which one. He didn’t understand why men like that got married in the first place.

It was sordid. He didn’t want it to be like that, with someone. But maybe it just happened like that, when fucking was involved. Maybe sex and love couldn’t coexist.

Floyd made a dismissive gesture. “Don’t listen to assholes like them. Some people would bitch about being served a five course meal because the plates weren’t made of gold.”

“Can you still be friends,” Ginsberg asked, “if you’re married? Couples act like they hate each other half the time.”

“Of course you can.” Floyd sighed and scratched at a patch of stubble on his jawline. “Fact of the matter is that Tina is the best friend I’ve ever had. It’s some kind of miracle that she’s put up with for me for as long as she has. Here’s the secret: don’t marry a woman you don’t _like_. You would be fucking amazed how many idiots have to be told that.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” said Ginsberg. “I’ve known a bunch of ‘em.”

“Well, there you have it. Do the opposite of what they did and you should be fine.”

“No, it’s - it’s got nothing to do with me.” Floyd was looking at him intently; Ginsberg tried to keep his face blank. “I’m not gonna be getting married, ever.”

“I don’t see how you can know that,” said Floyd slowly, “but it’s up to you, I guess.” He flipped his cards around so that Ginsberg could see them. Three of a kind. “They’re your cards. Do what you want with them.”

Ginsberg looked closely at the cards he held in his fingers. It was a shitty hand, and nothing he needed to keep. “I fold,” he said, and put them down on the table.

 

The canvas was shaping up to be something; what he couldn’t put a name to, but _something_ \- there was a silhouette coming through the smears of green and purple. A couple more days and he would crack it.

One of the nurses found his artwork disturbing. She had spoken to Dr.Tanaka about it. He had looked over Ginsberg’s body of work - all of two small paintings - during one of their sessions, and then handed them back with an expression that was suspiciously close to an eye-roll. “You’re doing fine. These are interesting, actually.”

Ginsberg couldn’t pinpoint the source of her amateur art criticism. He wasn’t painting real subjects, or even his dreams, like some of the guys did. His technical skills were meager. It was abstracted - forms clashing together, or melting towards the bottom of the frame.

Okay, so that was a little ominous. But if they were supposed to be painting to relieve their feelings it wasn’t all gonna be _nice_.

He rubbed in some red with his thumb. His hands were a mess anyway, no reason to try and stay clean.

“Michael,” said Annie, head nurse for the floor, poking her head into the room. “There’s someone at reception for you.”

He put his brush down and wiped his hands on his jeans. They were spotted with color. There were no visits planned for him and he had spoken to his father that morning on the phone - Morris would have said if he was coming up.

“You have paint all over your face,” Stan said when he saw him. “And not just there - what the hell were you doing, rolling in it?”

“No, I was just - painting. You know how it is.” Ginsberg wished he had tidied up some, which was stupid. Stan didn’t care what he looked like.

“Well, go wash up. We’re on a schedule.”

“What?”

“Ginzo,” Stan said, “do you even know what day it is?”

“Friday.”

“ _Sunday_. Sunday the twentieth.”

Ginsberg wracked his brain for why this was important. “Did I miss a birthday?”

“You’re gonna miss the moon landing if you keep it up.”

“Holy _shit_ ,” he gasped. “I can’t believe I forgot about that.” Immediately after there followed a rush of incredible disappointment. Was he going to get to see it? No one had mentioned letting the patients stay up to watch - and they were strict about bedtimes. Didn’t have a big enough nightshift to let everyone wander around at night.

He could see the practicality of it. It was still unfair.

“I was so excited,” he said. “But now - you think they’ll replay it, Stan?”

“Yeah, constantly,” said Stan. “But you get to see it tonight. I’m breaking you out.”

“I can’t,” said Ginsberg. “When you’ve been involuntarily committed - there’s this whole fucking thing -”

“For Christ’s sake,” said Stan, and he was laughing, leaning back in the folding chair and making it creak. “We’ve got permission - don’t we, Rosa?”

He hadn’t seen her there, behind the reception desk. It had a high counter and she was slouched down, reading a dimestore romance. Rosa was very short. The hem of her uniform touched below her knees.

“Yes, you have permission,” she said, sedately turning a page. “Everything was cleared with the doctor.”

“I - are you serious? I really get to go?”

“For the day - no longer,” said Rosa. She pursed her lips over a sentence in her book. “You have to be back by tomorrow evening.”

“I’m taking you to your Dad’s,” said Stan, “so go get anything you need for the night.”

He wanted to run in five different directions at once. He wanted to jump into the air and click his heels like Fred Flintstone. “I can’t believe this!”

“Believe it, and also hurry up. I want to beat the traffic going back into the city.”

In the bathroom he used hand soap to scrub himself as free of paint as he could. There was a red streak on his cheek that he had to scrape off with his fingernails. He held his fingers under the hot water for as long as he could stand, but his nail beds remained slightly pink on one hand and green on the other. A shower could help, but that would have to wait until tonight.

After a change of clothes he looked passable enough. His hair was past the bottle brush stage and was starting to curl up, so he wet his palms down and gave it a once-over.

All he had to bring along was his toothbrush and a comb. Most of his clothing was still in his bedroom at home. He would pick something out tomorrow.

He was going to get to lie in his own bed again. No locks on the windows. He could fall asleep smelling summer air.

In Brooklyn that meant exhaust from the street and the scent of the neighbor’s overheated garbage, but still.

“I’m impressed that my father managed to keep his mouth shut,” Ginsberg said as he and Stan walked to the car. “I talked to him today and he never said a thing.”

“He wanted it to be a surprise,” Stan said. He slid into his seat and rolled down the window. The car was a sauna, though it had been parked away from direct sunlight. “He’s craftier than he lets on.”

“You go see him often?” Ginsberg asked. They pulled out onto the drive. It wasn’t paved and the tires kicked up pebbles that bounced off the doors with a click.

“I try to,” Stan said. “I bring Peggy with me sometimes. He likes that. I think he may be in love with her.”

Ginsberg huffed out a laugh. The old man was a soft touch, and he’d liked Peggy right off the bat. Why don’t I ever see you with a girl like that, he had said that night at dinner, while Ginsberg ground his teeth together to keep a retort from escaping.

“Thanks,” he said, quietly.

“No problem,” Stan said after a minute, and then punched Ginsberg’s shoulder for some reason.

There was a phenomenal breeze blowing through the car now that they were on the freeway. Ginsberg tilted his head back to enjoy it fully. God, he missed being able to crack a window or turn on a fan to chase away the heat. At the institution all they could do was go outside and stand in the shade or hope for rain. It was an old brick box of a building, built for weathering storms and lasting years, not for comfort.

“I’m gonna stick my head out the window, like a dog,” Ginsberg said in bliss. “Don’t try to stop me.”

“Hey, you keep all your extremities inside this vehicle. If I bring you back to your father headless he’ll kick my ass.”

“Fine,” said Ginsberg. “Spoil my fun.” He leaned against the doorframe - _not_ out the window - and closed his eyes.

And opened them again when he felt Stan’s hand in his hair. “What,” he said, twitching into motion abruptly, pulling away.

“You’ve got a big patch of paint right here. It’s all over your ear - you’re bright blue, man. See?” Stan brushed the top of Ginsberg’s ear with the pad of his thumb.

Of course Ginsberg couldn’t see his own ear. What he could see were his wide eyes in the rear view mirror, because that small, innocuous touch felt way too good, and it sure as hell wasn’t a computer doing it. That was all him.

“I thought I got it all,” he said, and tried to stay as still as possible. He didn’t dare look at Stan - Stan might guess, he might _know_ \- so he looked out the window instead; at the sun sitting high in the sky, at the jewel green fields rolling past.

“Use baby oil on it when we get you home,” said Stan. “Works for me.”

“Uh,” said Ginsberg, clearing his throat as Stan put his hand back on the wheel. “Yeah. I’ll do that.”

They were coming upon a rest stop. Not a big one, just a gas station with an attached restaurant. There were a couple of cars parked outside, their occupants sitting in booths behind the plate glass window in front. He looked at them with open longing. There were many things that he had reconciled himself to over the past months, but hospital food was not one of them. He’d kill for a burger.

“Want to stop for something to eat?” Stan said, and Ginsberg could have -

Well, never mind. He agreed emphatically, put it that way.

“Please,” he said, and Stan took the car off the road.

 

He didn’t speak as they drove up familiar streets. There was the deli with the best smoked meat in the city, there was the market where they sold bread half-price on Sunday, there was the library he used to borrow records from when he was a teenager. Every thirty seconds he felt a spike of recognition. Everything was the same, except for him.

Stan parked behind the building and took a cooler out of the trunk. Beer, Ginsberg assumed - Morris rarely had any in the house. They went in the back way, walking up the long set of creaky stairs. There was new graffiti on the wall, he noticed - some poem about dropping acid written in black felt pen and a big drawing of a pig wearing a cop’s uniform.

Morris was beaming when he met them at the door. The apartment was bright with sunlight, every window thrown wide open, and Ginsberg could smell coffee brewing.

“How does it feel to be a free man?” his father asked. He looked like he might have actually slept and eaten since they had seen each other last, so that was an improvement.

“Pretty fucking great,” Ginsberg said.

“Michael -”

“Language, I know.” He heard Stan snicker behind him. “I’m not sure who you think I picked it up from.”

“Those little hoodlums you grew up with,” said Morris, “that’s who.” He turned towards the stove. “You boys want food? I can make something.”

“We ate on the way in,” Stan said. “But thanks, Mr. G.”

“For the last time, call me Morris. None of this stuffiness.”

Stan put the contents of the cooler - beer, as expected - into the fridge, and Ginsberg took a good look around the apartment. It had clearly been cleaned in preparation for company. There wasn’t a single dish in the sink, not even set out to dry, and the shoes in the coat closet were lined up with military precision.

“Pop,” he said, “I’m gonna go put my stuff away, okay?”

“Sure.” Morris said. He was pouring up coffee for them. “I bought new sheets for your bed, by the way.”

Once he was in his room Ginsberg lay on his back on those new sheets and shut his eyes. The mattress squeaked any time he moved and there was a broken spring poking him, but he had missed this. Just having the ability to steal away by himself for a second, to a space that belonged to him and no one else. He listened to the woman who lived next door singing along to her radio. The sound sailed right through the paper thin walls, slightly off-key but so unabashed that it was all the sweeter for it.

He might have drifted off briefly. When someone tapped on the top of his foot he opened his eyes, expecting his father.

It was Stan. “You getting overwhelmed?”

Ginsberg frowned. “No. Why would I be?”

Stan sat down at the foot of the bed and Ginsberg sat up to make room for him. Two people in the room made it seem much smaller - it was an addition to begin with, an extra bedroom made out of a closet and some hall space. The apartment had been a one-bedroom at some point in its history until somebody decided to expand. The whole building was like that, bits and pieces tacked together.

“I don’t know,” Stan said. “We did just kinda spring this on you. I didn’t give you much of a chance to say no.”

“I didn’t want to say no.” Ginsberg hated the idea that he was so unstable, and hated even worse that it was sometimes true. There was no use in going after Stan for it. He was only being nice. “Is Pop worried?”

“Ginzo, that man is always worried. It’s a permanent condition.”

“I hadn’t noticed.” Ginsberg scratched the back of his head, hair sticking up from the pillow. “I’ll be out in a second. I’m fine, I was just getting reaquainted.”

He sat up against the headboard for a few minutes more after Stan left him alone. The contours of the room were the same as they had always been, yet returning to them was disorienting in some small way. He had an odd sensation of déjà vu, like he had walked into a recurring dream. Had the windowshade always been crooked? Was that threadbare spot on the carpet new?

He would get used to it, once he came back for real. Whenever that was.

 

“Are they -” said Morris, and Ginsberg grabbed his arm to shush him. The three of them sat on the very edge of their seats, eyes fixed on the screen, afraid to move or talk or do anything that might jinx it -

\- and then Armstrong’s foot hit the dusty lunar surface, intercom crackling to life, and they exhaled in simultaneous relief.

“There he goes,” Morris breathed out, barely audible. Those weren’t the famous words, the historic words - but whenever Ginsberg thought of it in the years following, they were the first words he would remember.

 

He took a shower of appalling, self-indulgent length afterwards. Halfway through he found himself laughing helplessly, because he could, because he was in here _alone_ , letting the hot water run out like an ass. He turned his face up into the spray.

The baby oil did take the paint off his skin. Stan was right.

Clean as a whistle, he sat out on the fire escape and watched headlights go back and forth on the road. There weren’t many. Everyone had somewhere to be tonight. Most people were still awake - the windows were glowing all around him, and he could see the odd silhouette pass by them.

The sky was a different kind of black than it was out in the country. Lighter, somehow. He had never known that before. Not many stars, either, but that was the city for you. All those streetlights and lit up signs.

“You’ll catch pneumonia, sitting out here wet,” Morris said, settling back against the railing.

“It’s summer, Pop,” Ginsberg said. “If that was the case everyone would end up sick from getting out of the pool.” He pointed up at the moon, nestled among wisps of cloud like a diamond in a blanket. “Can you believe there are footprints up there right now? They’ll be there forever.”

“And a flag,” said Morris. “I think it should’ve been a picture of the earth, but I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“I hope they get back down okay,” said Ginsberg.

“They will,” Morris said.

They were quiet for a few minutes, both watching the vast stretch of dark above them, trying to parse the change in it and in everything else. Men on the moon. It made the world seem so small.

“So how you coming along, kiddo?” Morris asked. “Feel like your old self again?”

“Close to it,” he said. He wasn’t sure if he could get back to the way he was. But that wasn’t the goal anymore. “How have you been? Stan said he’s been coming up to keep you company.”

“It helps, with you gone. He brings that pretty Olson girl with him sometimes.” Morris nodded towards the back of Stan’s head, visible over the back of the couch. He was on the phone with Peggy, and he laughed at something she said. “That’s a good friend you got there.”

“I know,” said Ginsberg, shooting a quick, fond glance at him.

Morris started to speak and then hesitated. He had a funny expression on his face, kinda like he was bracing himself to jump into cold water. “Is he - is he _that_ kind of friend?”

Ginsberg’s mouth went dry. His eyes darted towards Stan, still inside on the couch talking to Peggy, still oblivious. “Could we not do this right now.”

“Michael -”

“Stop it,” Ginsberg hissed. “He’s going to hear you. Stan’s not - he isn’t like that.”

“How could I know? You can’t tell by looking.”

“Well, he’s not. So knock it off before I lose that good friend.”

Morris looked completely miserable. “You don’t understand what I’m saying,” he pleaded, voice low. “I spent so much time saying the wrong thing to you. I’m trying to apologize - it doesn’t matter, okay? What do I care if you like girls? I made you feel terrible for nothing, and then you were gone away. I made so many mistakes -”

“You did fine. I wasn’t lying to you. I like girls - I _think_ I like girls.” Ginsberg cringed. “But it’s not that simple for me. I can’t tell you why I’m like this. Maybe I’m just a pervert.”

“How can you be a pervert? You never even go out with anyone.”

“I don’t have to if I’m - looking at men.” He looked down at the metal grating below his feet and the drop beneath that. “Being like that is a crime. That’s how much people hate it.”

“People hate a lot of things,” said Morris, and he would know. “Fuck ‘em.”

Ginsberg smiled a little at that. “I told you I got my foul mouth from you.”

“I should have known better,” said Morris. “But I didn’t because sometimes I’m just too old and stubborn for my own good. I don’t care which way you turn out to be. I want you to be happy, Michael. That’s the most important thing.”

“Thanks,” Ginsberg murmured. He didn’t know what else to say.

“Hey, Ginsberg,” Stan yelled from his seat. He looked back over his shoulder and waved the phone in the air. “Come in and talk to Peggy. She wants to say goodnight.”

He grabbed a beer when he went in and wished for something stronger. Palming the cool glass, he sat down next to Stan and took the phone. There was only the faintest of tremors in his hand.

“Hello,” he said to Peggy, feeling a smile stretch across his face. “Hell of a night, isn’t it?”

 

“You sure you can’t stay?” his father said as he hugged him goodbye. “You said yourself you’re getting better.”

“I am,” Ginsberg said. “That’s why I have to go back.”

That wasn’t the only reason; he had a question he needed to ask and there was only one person who could answer it for him.

Yet when the time came he couldn’t do it. He sat there staring at Dr.Tanaka, mute, and just -

\- did nothing.

A week passed, and then two. Floyd left and Ginsberg got a new roommate, a guy who said the holy rosary under his breath for hours into the night. Ginsberg got his father to bring him up a pair of earplugs on their next visit. Something terrible happened in L.A. and he called Peggy to make sure Megan was okay, and she was, of course she was. He and Dr. Tanaka talked about the way he reacted to bad shit on the news at night, and whether he should be watching it all.

He could never say what he wanted to. Every time he tried his throat froze up. He couldn’t speak.

The question burned inside him for a month. A whole month, until five minutes into a session he interrupted Dr. Tanaka, guts cramped up in fear, and asked in a voice that sounded completely unlike himself:

“Is it - is it possible to like both?”

Dr. Tanaka put down his writing pad. “I’m sorry?”

“Both. Like both - I don’t know how to say this. Men and women. _Both_.”

“Oh,” he said, sitting straight up in his chair, posture suddenly formal. “Are you saying this applies to you?”

Ginsberg swallowed. His throat felt like sandpaper. “If I say it does are you going to keep me here?”

“Michael, no one has any interest in forcing you to stay here,” Dr. Tanaka said. “I only wanted to know if you were asking out of curiosity, or because you’ve experienced some same-sex attraction.”

“Some,” Ginsberg said, just above a whisper. “I’ve looked, y’know? Recently. Um, at a friend of mine. I know I shouldn’t do that. But not just him, and not just now. It started when I was a teenager. Some of the guys I knew, or men in the movies. I remember watching _Cat on a Hot Tin Roof_ and thinking, his eyes are so blue - but how the hell was I supposed to know that meant anything? I thought everybody felt that way about Paul Newman!”

“So you don’t have any actual experience with -”

“Of course not. Everything I ever got called in a locker room was already true, you think I wanted to give someone an opportunity to knock out my teeth? Besides, it’s not just men. It’s women, too.” Hannah, all those years ago, shyly putting her hand on his thigh when she kissed him. How the days that Dawn smiled at him in the morning were always much better than the days she didn’t. The softness of Peggy’s lips against his. He had tried everything short of drilling a hole in his head to dig that last one out. No dice. It was lodged in there forever. “I wish I could stay on one side or the other. Either be normal, or a fucking homo. At least then I’d know what I was.”

“What you are,” said Dr. Tanaka, “is someone who is attracted to both men and women. That’s really all there is to it.”

Ginsberg just looked at him.

“I’m aware that’s an unorthodox opinion. But - well, there’s less consensus on these kinds of issues than you might guess.”

“Your books there don’t seem to think so,” Ginsberg said, pointing to the bookshelf beside the desk. He’d looked through them while waiting for the doctor to come in.

“Please don’t read my books,” Dr. Tanaka sighed. “They aren’t intended for a layperson.”

“They were pretty clear on this subject, actually.”

“Look,” Dr. Tanaka said. “You’re the patient here. What you want is paramount. So - do you want to try and change this? I can recommend you to a specialist if that’s the case. That wouldn’t be my first choice, but I’m not the affected party.”

Ginsberg gnawed on his lower lip. The decision came to him with unexpected ease. “What I want,” he said carefully, drawing out each word, “is to stop feeling bad about this.”

Dr. Tanaka leaned back in his chair and picked up his writing pad again. “Then let’s get to work,” he said, and flipped it open.

 

“So,” said Peggy. “Next week.”

“Next week,” Ginsberg agreed. They were walking in slow circles around the building, watching the sun set. Peggy was wearing a very familiar fringed jacket that did not belong to her; he had given her a significant look when he saw her in it and she had turned red and pretended not to notice.

Even a week before she may not have needed it but the weather was turning. The nights were suddenly cool and the leaves had gone gold and crumpled brown. There was wind blowing in from the north - not carrying any snow, just the promise of it.

Peggy shivered and huddled into his side. Her legs were bare. It was still warm enough for that during the day, generally.

“Want to go inside?” he asked. “Bet I can talk Rosa into giving you a cup of coffee.”

“No, I’m fine,” she said. “I have to stop by a gas station on my way home. I’ll get something there.”

They resumed their walk. The sky had become a brilliant orange, dabbed here and there with red. It looked post-apocalyptic.

“Is your Dad going to be picking you up?” she asked, dragging the toe of her boot through some fallen leaves. He could smell the wet, peaty earth underneath.

“Of course - and Stan,” he said, casting a sly, sideways glance at her. She refused to acknowledge it, admitting nothing.

“You must be excited.”

He stopped and looked back at the building. That was his window, right there on the top left. And there was the common room on the same side. Someone inside turned on a lamp.

He had packed most of his things. He was ready to go.

“Can I tell you a secret?” he said. “I’m scared shitless.”

 

 

 

> Rose raised her head and watched the vines above them move. They were dark gray, the color of a rotting, dead thing, and they wriggled like snakes. It made her dizzy, but she kept her eyes fixed upwards. Through the gaps she could see the sky, and in the sky she could see stars. One of those stars was home.
> 
> “What are we supposed to do?” her brother asked. He was shaking, and trying to hide it from her.
> 
> She took his hand in hers. “I don’t know,” she said. “But we have to keep going” 
> 
> Ginsberg, Michael & Rizzo, Stanley. (Illustrator). (1975). _The Last Planet_. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.

 

 

 


End file.
